The White House had kind but distant words for the former majority leader this morning. But it's hard to tell exactly how sad they are to see him go.

Bush confirmed he chatted with Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) last night, who informed him of his decision. "My reaction was, it had to have been a very difficult decision for someone who loved representing his district in Texas," Bush said. "Congressman DeLay has been a good ally with whom the president has worked to get things done for the people," spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

Ally, indeed. "DeLay's relationship with President Bush is not a warm one," Congressional Quarterly notes in its annual profile of DeLay. "[A]t times he has stood in the way of Bush's agenda."

Bush ran hot and cold on DeLay, although recently he's been more cold than anything else. As TomPaine.com noted in February, "Tom DeLay doesnât attend White House briefings anymore."

"There are no second acts in American lives," F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. But with the curtain closing on Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-TX) second act -- a bravura performance as one of the most powerful House majority leaders in modern history -- Fitzgerald can go jump in a lake.

What will DeLay do for a follow-up? We doubt he'll return to his first love, exterminating bugs. The Houston Chroniclereports today he's going to "move to Virginia to work with a conservative organization," at least unless a federal judge gets other ideas. Anybody know which group recruited the Hammer?

Well, Tom DeLay has bowed out of his congressional race to spend more time with his lawyers.

But as Josh mentioned last night, DeLay's machine remains. And since the Justice Department's bribery investigation took a direct turn toward DeLay with Tony Rudy's guilty plea last week, the second former aide of DeLay's to plead guilty, one has to imagine the fallout were DeLay to eventually be indicted in a federal investigation.

You remember the media frenzy after Jack Abramoff's guilty plea in January. Dozens of members of Congress rushed to return or donate Abramoff's and his clients' money. And recently, the same has occurred with Tony Rudy, although Rudy is not a household name - so only 13 of the 34 Republicans who received contributions from him have returned them.

But imagine the predicament Republicans would find themselves in were DeLay to be indicted as part of the Justice Department's investigation. Fundraising was DeLay's specialty, and the main way that he kept House members in his debt. It's difficult to even calculate DeLay's impact in dollars, given how central he's been to the Republican money machine (appearing at others' fundraisers, directed corporate dollars to the GOP), but at the least, one would have to look at DeLay's political committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, which he's used to spread money around to hundreds of Republican House candidates since 1996.

$3.47 million of ARMPAC's money has gone directly to Republican candidates since '96. And to over 100 members of the current Congress, usually in $10,000 payments.

So here's something to watch - here's a list of the GOP candidates who received money from DeLay in '04. How long will they hold on to it? Tony Rudy's guilty plea implicated another former DeLay aide, Ed Buckham, who used to run ARMPAC. Jim Ellis, another former head of ARMPAC, has already been indicted in Texas for laundering corporate contributions down there, along with DeLay himself. How many former leaders of ARMPAC and others connected with DeLay have to go down before ARMPAC money is finally seen as tainted?

In 2001, disgraced GOP superlobbyist Jack Abramoff approached the Sudanese government -- the one with a record of terrorism and human rights violations -- and offered to clean up its image in Washington for a few million bucks, the Los Angeles Timesreports today.

[Abramoff's] former associate, who did not want to be named out of fear it might damage future business opportunities, said that Abramoff proposed a $16- to $18-million contract -- "a staggering sum" for the destitute nation -- but one that the lobbyist considered reasonable because international disapproval was so costly to Sudan's economy.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell revealed yesterday that he owned stock in Diebold, a voting-machine manufacturer, at the same time his office negotiated a deal that critics have said was an attempt to steer business to the company.

As you've no doubt heard by now, Tom DeLay has decided to not seek re-election. Because he has already won the Republican primary, he can't simply drop out or the Republicans will have no candidate. So he has to be disqualified. "To be disqualified he must die, be convicted of a felony or move out of the state." Although DeLay may very well be convicted of a felony before November, his apparent plan is to pull up stakes and move to Virginia. He will retire from Congress sometime in late May or mid-June.

As for the reasons for DeLay's choice, most outlets buy the general storyline that polls were showing him facing a very tough race - and so DeLay selflessly decided to bow out so Republicans could retain the seat. The NY Times is one of the few to cite legal troubles as the reason:

One DeLay ally said that the lawmaker had been considering leaving Congress since he gave up his leadership post in January and that he had been persuaded to make the break last week, when his former deputy chief of staff, Tony Rudy, pleaded guilty to corruption charges.

R. Jeffrey Smith of The Washington Post points out one advantage to DeLay's quitting the race now: he can convert all of the campaign money he would have spent on a close election to his legal defense fund. Contributions to the fund had been dropping late last year.

The Capitol Police have requested an arrest warrant for Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), on unspecified charges. Abramoff-chaser U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, on his way out to become Assistant Attorney General for National Security, is "reviewing the merits" of the case, his spokesperson says.

But Roll Call this morning attributes to Cullen a comment that DeLay has "voluntarily turned over to federal investigators about 100 e-mails written by DeLay staffers over the years that had to do with Abramoff."

Well, which is it -- one hundred? One thousand? We emailed Cullen. "It was about a thousand," the lawyer Blackberried back.

The number, of course, isn't the point. If DeLay turned the e-mails over, it's a fair bet they don't implicate him. (Cullen told Newsweek the congressman doesn't even use e-mail.) They may implicate the little fish, but Justice has most of them on ice already. We asked Cullen how his team decided which emails to provide and which to hold; we haven't heard back.

Last week, Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) released a statement purporting to prove that the townhouse he purchased from Ed Buckham's U.S. Family Network was sold at fair market price. But his statement (which we've posted here) and its accompanying documentation doesn't prove any such thing. In fact, it only confirms how odd the sale actually was.

Let's review.

As we reported for the first time last Monday, Ryun bought the Capitol Hill townhouse at far below market value in 2000 - as much as $100,000 below, according to experts we spoke to. The seller was the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit controlled by Tom DeLay's former chief of staff Ed Buckham. The USFN was little more than a front for Buckham, a slush fund pumped full of money ($2.3 million over four years) by Jack Abramoff's clients. (Buckham was recently implicated in Tony Rudy's guilty plea for helping Abramoff bribe Rudy.)

So what's Ryun's defense?

Ryun claims that he found structural deficiencies that effected the price of the townshouse. According to his statement, Ryun consulted a housing inspector who found that "the upstairs master bathroom was in danger of falling through the living room ceiling because of the size of the bathtub put in by the previous owner." He then followed up by speaking with a contractor who estimated the repairs would cost "between $10,000 and $20,000."

But Ryun does not produce documentation for these estimates, nor does he suggest that such documentation ever existed or that he provided it to the U.S. Family Network as part of the negotiations. What he did do, according to his account, was "ask" the USFN to take the contractor's estimate "into consideration." The USFN then apparently voluntarily depressed the sale price based on Ryun's verbal assurances that repairs were needed. That's seems far from a normal process of negotiation. And how many building inspectors produce no written record of their work?